Victorian literature and the anorexic body / / Anna Krugovoy Silver [[electronic resource]]

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910455972803321
• Autore: Silver Anna Krugovoy
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002
• ISBN: 1-107-13428-5; 0-511-48492-5; 0-511-14796-1; 0-511-32576-2; 1-280-15973-1; 0-511-12078-8; 0-521-02551-6; 0-511-04584-0
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (x, 220 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Collana: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; ; 36
• Disciplina: 820.9/356
• Soggetti: English literature - 19th century - History and criticism; Anorexia nervosa in literature; Women and literature - Great Britain - History - 19th century; Eating disorders in literature; Human body in literature; Body image in literature; Sex role in literature; Appetite in literature; Hunger in literature; Women in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-216) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Waisted women: reading Victorian slenderness -- Appetite in Victorian children's literature -- Hunger and repression in Shirley and Villette -- Vampirism and the anorexic paradigm -- Christina Rossetti's sacred hunger -- Conclusion: the politics of thinness.
• Sommario/riassunto: Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British ; writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women 'performed' their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.